Tough governance lessons from SF Schoolboard recall

National media is still considering the political ramifications of the overwhelming rejection and recall of a trio of hard-left schoolboard members in that liberal suburb to the north. But aside from the politics of it all, perhaps a bigger question lingers unanswered: how on Earth did the democratic processes fail so spectacularly in SF? How would three schoolboard members with policies so out of touch with their voters get elected in the first place? Lia Rensin--a volunteer with Alliance for Constructive Ethnic Studies (a non-profit, non-partisan organization based in Northern California committed to removing ideological and political agendas from Ethnic Studies courses throughout the US) --provides perspective.

Opp Now: Is there a difference in how school board members are elected that would make this fiasco more likely?

Lia Rensin: The core process isn't that different from other elections--people run for office, they campaign, people vote. But the difference is in the visibility of the candidate and their positions. School issues are usually low priority in a city. In a city like SF, remember, most voters are either single or don't have kids. The parents are the only ones who know what's going on, and even then, they have pretty limited visibility as to what goes on in the classroom. As a result, school board members get elected without much informed investigation of their educational priorities. Most people tend to vote around issues like name recognition or broader allegiance with national political positions. You see five or six names on a ballot, many people just sort of guess.

I bet that if you ask people in San Jose or Sunnyvale who their school board members were, they'd be hard pressed to name them.

The media doesn't cover what happens at the school board. So, if you want to become aware of the issues, you have to attend school board meetings, which are long and boring and often not very revealing.

ON: I have been at a few of those school board meetings. It's rough sledding. Everybody is speaking in euphemism. It's like all the decisions have been made behind the scenes, and the meeting is just theater. Long, dull theater I might add.

LR: I don't know if it's intentional, but it certainly is obscure. What often ends up happening is that people don't know issues are coming up, the agenda drops two days beforehand on the school district website. If you're paying close attention, you might be on top of it, but even then, you have to excavate a bunch of links with a bunch of unreadable documents to figure out what's going on. And even then, you only have two days to rally your neighbors.

ON: Then you show up at the meeting, your neighbors speak, the school board members nod their heads, say they are very "mindful" of your concerns, then pass whatever they were going to pass anyway.

LR: We saw that when we voiced concern about Ethnic Studies curriculum development and teacher training. The citizen review is very pro forma. They say, 'Yes we hear your concerns', then they pass the motion unanimously.

ON: A lot of people seem to view the school board as a steppingstone to a bigger elected office, not as a position to realize their educational training or concerns. Down here in San Jose, we often don't get educators or parents running, we get people who have an eye on county or city offices.

LR: It's not unique to San Jose: aspiring politicians are recruited to run for school board not to help students or schools, but to start a political career. But it gets worse--even those people who get elected out of real concern for education almost always get swallowed up by the machine, they get rolled by the bureaucracy and nobody really works for the parents or students.

ON: I have been surprised at how school board members so quickly take a subservient position to staff. It's upside down: staff works for the board, but the board doesn't dare challenge the Superintendent or staff. It's almost comic watching newly elected schoolboard members go from pronouncing their commitment to independence to obsequious conformity in a week.

LR: It absolutely happens the majority of the time. Superintendents tend to have the most control even though they're in a hired position. They fall back on union requirements and union contracts to defend their power. Working on curriculum reform, I get run around a lot by school board members, but I get even more obfuscation from staff. I'm sure that a lot of new school board members come in thinking they can be agents of change but learn very quickly that entrenched staff are calling the shots.

ON: The SF schoolboard members were blown out in the recall--more than 70% wanted to get rid of them. How on earth did they get elected in the first place if they were so out of touch with their electorate?

LR: Clearly, those school board members were not focused on things the parents were focused on, and they got caught up in the national issues of the moment. Parents were worried about kids losing ground educationally, stymied emotional and social development, a lost year. And the school board was busy renaming schools and complaining about white supremacy and the tyranny of meritocracy.

They weren't being school board members; they were being aspiring politicians. And the blowback was predictable and justified.

ON: The school board members who were recalled said they ran on racial equity; people shouldn't have been surprised they acted on it.

LR: Maybe they did run on that. But the pandemic came and required them to pivot to a new agenda, and they couldn't or didn't. Racial equity sounds good in theory, but not everybody shares the same understanding of what that means in practice. When people on the extreme control the agenda to use as a steppingstone, it gets pretty controversial when you start to operationalize it. So, when parents started to see the political agenda behind it, lots of parents said "stop." And because of COVID parents got a closer look at how those ideas infiltrated the curriculum, and they said, "not so fast." When the school board persevered despite their protests, "not so fast" became, "you're outta here." And hence, the recall.

More on the Alliance for Constructive Ethnic Studies can be found here.

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Image by Stephen Lam